U.S. online retail sales is estimated to reach $248.7 billion by 2014, up more than $60 billion from 2010. Despite the prevalence of online sales, completing an online purchase still requires users to type in their name, email address, credit card information, and shipping details. To make matters worse, most online retailers require users to create accounts on their site, which adds yet another step and more data entry to the process for the user. Furthermore, every time a user enters such information to facilitate an online purchase, the user's credentials are exposed to misappropriation by malware, key loggers and phishing websites.
Some online retailers allow users with accounts to store payment and shipping information, and choose from previously entered options after having logged into the webstore. However, users still need to reenter this information for each separate online merchant, and they need to login to each specific webstore each time they wish to make a purchase. Paypal and Google have alleviated this problem to some extent by allowing users to enter their identifying, payment and shipping information one time, and then choosing Paypal or Google Checkout to complete online transactions with multiple webstores. These services allow a user to choose payment and shipping details from menus, and provide the webstore with notification of payment along with the user's shipping details. Paypal and Google Checkout are a big step forward over having to enter this information individually for each purchase at each webstore, but they still fail to provide a means for checkout that does not require users to login each time they make a purchase. For example, a customer can visit a webstore, add items to his or her cart, choose checkout, and then select the Paypal or Google Checkout option. At this point, the user must login to his or her Paypal or Google Checkout account, requiring manual entry of the username and password each time the user makes a purchase.
It would be desirable to address these issues.